Why in god's green Earth do dungeons have a timer?

[Diadumenos]

In for 1 on Timers not being needed. Add them to the EX/hard mode if that's what gets your rocks off. The duty finder is already full of "who cares if we have a first timer" queing up on duty. Or group leaders rushing through 99% of the instance just so they are sure they have time on the final boss (incase things go awry).

If they want to keep the timer, don't hide behind technical "issues" that only seem to plague FFXIV. Give something like extra exp/gil whatever for completing in XXX time. That will at least give the elitist d-bags a valid argument.

[Lithera]

And I don't need all my fingers to count the number of times since 2.1 that I've actually been waiting for an instance reservation. This was a problem when the game launched and was again when CT was the new thing, but now it's only cropping up on the more heavily populated datacenters and only at the start of the week. There's a big difference between corner cutting and running a cost effective game. Yah let's bring in 1000s of dollars in computer equipment (and the associated overhead costs) to deal with congestion for 3-4 hours one night a week. My company makes automotive seats for Honda. If our lines are set up to run 800 sets of seats per day and once a week Honda decides to push out 1000 we don't rebalance our line and bring in manpower to run 1000 a day. We stay at 800 and run OT to build the extra 200.

[Cid_Grim]

Since the very first time I ran an instance in this game, I can count on one hand the amount of times my party failed due to the timer running out.

As a matter of fact, I can do the math with less than 3 fingers.

[Naunet]

I would be willing to bet that if the timers were removed, nothing would change regarding the congestion. Hundreds of thousands of people aren't going to magically start squatting in instances just because they can. I've only been in a group that ran up against the timer once (outside of, say, FC Coil nights, where we hammer Twintania for several hours >_<) - my very first time in Cutter's Cry way back last year, we wiped a bunch on the ant queen boss and ended up getting to the last boss right as the timer ticked down.

I highly doubt we would magically start seeing instance servers filling up at all hours of the day if the timers were removed, because 99% of groups are going to go in, finish the dungeon in 20 or so minutes (maybe half an hour), and leave. In other words, the timers may as well not exist. They do nothing to limit the number of simultaneous instances active. The couple people sitting in an instance to do an RP scene are not going to clog your instance servers. The timers are just as useless in managing server load as the restriction on mailing to alts is in preventing RMT.